In some lost towns, Katrina went beyond destruction

By James Janega Tribune staff reporter
Sun Sep 11, 9:40 AM ET

This town is no more. Neither are Delacroix, or Reggio. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, neither are most of the towns and fishing hamlets of rural St. Bernard Parish.

The uniformity of the destruction is astonishing. This town is worse than Reggio. There is nothing left whole in Yscloskey but a coiled hose and a fluorescent light bulb.

"Awful," said Henry Rodriguez Jr., parish president, as he rode Saturday on recently cleared roads and viewed the disaster damage with the sheriff and the director of port operations.

"It looks like a war zone," he said as they stopped their black sport-utility vehicle on the road between what was once Yscloskey and Reggio.

Blocked by receding waters and foul, sticking mud, emergency workers and parish officials had to wait until Saturday to see this part of the parish.

The devastation they found was total. Waves wiped entire towns from the map.

The storm could not have found a more delicate, vulnerable part of Louisiana, where much of the nation's seafood and a good chunk of its oil are produced. The state is second only to Alaska as a producer of seafood, with most of the oysters gathered here coming from waters off devastated St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.

Likewise, with major oil refineries in Meraux, Chalmette and Belle Chasse, the two parishes account for a quarter to a third of Louisiana's 59 million-barrel-a-day oil production and some 14 percent of its natural-gas output.

Saturday, the oil refineries and pumps hidden in the bayous of St. Bernard Parish were silent. The fishing fleets that supply the nation with sweet oysters and fat shrimp were in pieces, or landlocked behind drying mud and splintered debris.

Of more immediate concern, the towns that once supported the industries were destroyed. And it looked less as if they had been wrecked by water than by a bomb. In Reggio, trophy rifles and shotguns rusted on a roadside. Washing machines lay in a nearby ditch, covered in cracked, drying mud. Clothing hung in the branches of live oaks beside Spanish moss, and someone's sour mash whiskey collection lay unconsumed but covered in papery, peeling filth.

Houses nearby were now piles of cinderblocks--a kitchen sink beside a corroding lawn mower, a boy's bicycle tangled in a window frame.

Church survives

The only thing to survive in Reggio was the San Pedro Pescador Catholic Church, named for St. Peter the Fisherman. But water had found its way into the second-floor sanctuary, defiling the carpets and coating the wooden pews with mold.

The crucifix stayed in place, though it was unclear who would worship there if nothing else in the town was standing.

There were none of the chemicals and fetid sewer stench of nearby Chalmette and Meraux, as they struggled with a filthy, 3 1/2-square-mile oil spill over what was once a bucolic Southern neighborhood.

In southern St. Bernard Parish, this was where the sea washed onto land, treetop high and crashing horribly, when Katrina roared ashore Monday.

Television sets dangled by cords from tree branches and fishing nets--dozens of them--wound around cypress trees and splintered homes. In places, there were no homes, just cinder block stairways.

Snowy egrets fluttered like angels over the silent devastation. Oysters were washed onto the town's single road.

Officials believe most of the people evacuated these towns before Katrina hit.

If they had not, their bodies would be buried under rubble crushed into such small pieces that emergency workers have had trouble marking them. There was nothing big enough to write on for the crews who passed through carrying cans of neon orange spray paint to mark the locations of the dead. In places, responders marked trees nearby but found no dead.

If there are corpses yet to be found, they could have been washed into the endless swamps and palmetto marshes around the towns. It will be weeks before the living will likely return to this part of St. Bernard, parish officials say.

Nothing left to protect

Later Saturday, Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., rumbled down deserted roads in amphibious vehicles whose racket could be heard for miles in what had been an awful silence. National Guardsmen from Colorado and firefighters from around the country have been following in order to search more thoroughly for survivors or victims.

The Marines pulled up Saturday in a cul-de-sac in Yscloskey (pronounced why-KLOS-key by locals). But there was no one to save, and nothing left to protect.

Gone is the pleasant canal crossroads where the fishermen built their houses on stilts, their back porches serving as docks for their pirogues and motorboats. Their working boats are there, but in pieces--clogging bayous and canals, or sitting upside down on roads or in trees.

It is the same in Delacroix, once home to generations of fishers and trappers on the southern Louisiana bayou. Heavy pilings remain where houses were built to survive massive flooding.

But they were no match for the horizontal mudslide that blasted through the cypress trees and came in through windows and down hallways of the few houses that weren't blown completely apart.

A post with a sign reading "Fire Station No. 12" had fallen into the water, but it wasn't clear where the fire station had been.

Unlike other areas where rescuers fan through neighborhoods looking for people, here the only emergency equipment brought in so far was a backhoe on a flatbed truck.

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Breaking News!!!!!!!

St. Bernard parish fears 1,500 dead

CHALMETTE, La., Sept. 8 (UPI) -- While attention remains focused on New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, the devastated nearby parish of St. Bernard may have lost 1,500 citizens.

"It is total devastation," said Sgt. 1st Class James Scalla of the Ohio National Guard, who is in the parish, told the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper. "There is nothing. We are in survival mode."

Authorities fear the coastal parish of 68,000, may have lost as many as 1,500 of its people.

One resident in Chalmette escaped death 10 days ago when she popped through the roof of her home just ahead of rising flood waters. "I jumped out of my roof," she said.

On Wednesday, teams that retrieve the dead went to a nursing home near Chalmette. The sheriff's deputy said up to 27 bodies were inside, apparently the victims of heat and dehydration.

The parish is known for outstanding fishing, an annual spring shrimp festival and hardy residents, the report said.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

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Wiped out' says it all for parish

200,000-gallon oil spill adds insult to already bruised community

By James Janega
Tribune staff reporter
Published September 9, 2005


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And at the pumping station that drains floodwater from the parish, the attendants have been stuck for more than a week, said Harding Guisinger, an M-16-toting employee of United States Environmental Services Inc., which specializes in environmental cleanup.

"They're sleeping sitting down," he said.

Guisinger used to bring them water, military food rations and fuel by boat. But now the water is too shallow for boats, and the mud's too deep for trucks.

He stood in rubber boots ankle-deep in murky water that boiled with trapped fish at his feet. He and co-worker Brian Deubler were trying to get a motorcycle out of a storage shed, but the motor had seized.

Guisinger gestured grandly at the devastation around him.

"That was company headquarters," he said, and then pointed to another ruined building. "This was my shop. That blue-and-white one is the maritime services building."

"We fared out pretty good. We got most of our buildings," Guisinger said.

Then Deubler walked over. "I didn't have time to get anything out," he said quietly. "I don't know what we're going to do."

By Thursday afternoon, National Guardsmen had barely moved into neighborhoods off Louisiana Highway 47 and Judge Perez Avenue. In the parish command center, officials argued about how much help to bring in.

"We got it," Rodriguez said. "We just gotta coordinate it."

Andrew Martin of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

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